When referring to a portal is generally meant an Internet portal. Internet portals interacting with end users usually provide for session management in order to be able to track and keep control of the activities of the end users, and in order to store end user specific information, like authentication status, information, such as lists and order of initiated actions and resulting events etc. Today a portal often needs to be able to integrate functionality of other software systems or even other portals. However, sometimes such other systems, such as services/applications or other portals, have their own session management. This means that in one way or another session management as provided for by different session managing means needs to be integrated or combined.
There is also an increasing need to personalize or customize the way an end user can access services irrespectively of the actual location of the services or applications, or who is the provider. Also the demand for access to mobile Internet services gains importance, i. e. that end users may want to be able to, in a rapid and uncomplicated manner, get access to services from any end user station, i. e. also from mobile devices; it may e. g. relate to sending and receiving e-mails, short messages, accessing web-based information from mobile as well as from fixed end user devices in a user-friendly, quick and simple manner. This is called the mobile Internet.
Browsing using a mobile device is however more difficult than browsing using a PC, since the mobile device, as compared to the PC, has limited input and output capabilities. Thus, this means that it gets even more difficult to provide mobile end users with a satisfactory personalization, and management of services as well as session management get even more complicated. Anyhow, there is an increasing demand on behalf of the end user to always be able to access applications and services. A portal is such a doorway to the content of services and applications which particularly should be tailored to suit the end user preferences.
Examples on portal content are information services (also including push content which relates to an Internet technique through which all information a user subscribes to automatically is provided to the user, or information that the service provider or operator means that the user should be provided with). Examples on information services are weather forecasts or weather information in general, commercial services such as shopping malls, or generally any kind of information, multimedia services such as streaming audio/video, games, instant messaging and newsgroups, web based mall, access to particular communities through chat-rooms. It is also desirable to be able to provide appealing graphical user interfaces for representing applications and menus on PC: s, and particularly also for WAP enabled devices, in case a portal is mobile. Much effort is also put down on personalizing the structure and the content of personal portals, and to provide a possibility to control the interaction and behaviour of individual services and applications, by setting personal preferences. It is however difficult to provide for satisfactory access possibilities irrespectively of which kind of device that is used by an end user. Particularly when different systems need to be integrated, as far as session management issues are concerned, i. e. when the different systems (portals, services/applications, other portals etc.) have their own session management, the situation may get very complicated.
Until now many applications are in principle exclusively designed for the 2G telecommunications environment and they have been implemented as monolithical blocks or with a proprietary service network to handle the specific QoS requirements for the respective applications. This has a consequence that such applications work satisfactory as isolated applications, but they are difficult to integrate with other applications developed in similar ways. Applications developed for the Internet (Internet protocol) environment have to a large extent been based on established and open de facto standards supporting extensive integration of different applications. Many such standards have been used in the 2G environment for non realtime critical applications. However, through the introduction of 3G networks (3GPP), future applications will contain a mixture of telecommunication and datacommunication services, mixing higher and lower bit rates as well as real time and non-real time traffic. The service networks of today are not designed to handle such mixtures, nor are the existing IP-based applications designed for the specific characteristics concerning wireless networks. As can be seen there are many complicating factors concerning the provision of satisfactory access for end users to services, particularly when session management is handled by different session managers for different systems/entities.
Session management of homogeneous portal environments can be clearly specified and may for example be performed based on the servlet session API (Application Programming Interface) specification or the session EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) specification. These specifications define the basic operations for session management, namely to create/destruct a session and to get, set and remove a key-value pair in a constructed session.
Internet portals are usually provided with a session management system allowing tracking of the actions initiated by an end user. Such actions may for example include the actions end user entering the system, authentication of the end user, access by the end user to a portal service etc. As long as the end user navigates within the portal, i. e. requests access to services/applications internal to the portal, which here means services/applications for which session management is handled centrally within the portal, session management can be handled easily, since every portal service can ask a central session manager, i. e. the portal session managing means, to retrieve information stored in the session of the end user. The sessions are particularly stored in storing means. However, the situation is different if an end user requests access to an external system or to a service or an application integrated with the portal, or an external service/application, which here means a service/application having an external, or its own specific session management. The situation can then be very complicated. A serious problem is that, if a service or an application (or another portal), that an end user wants to access via a portal structure, has its own session management, the external session management may be incompatible to the portal session management. This is often the case when application service providers offer services to portal owners. For various reasons it may not be desirable to expose the external session management to the end user. Still further the sessions created taking into account also the external session management tend to get very long, i. e. the session identity that is used in communication with the end user has to contain not only the portal session identity, but in addition thereto also the external session identity. Often such lengthy session identifications can not be handled by the clients served by the portal. This is particularly serious if the end user station is a mobile device such as a WAP-device, which simply might not be able to handle such large amounts of data. Even for an end user station able to handle such amounts of data only for identification purposes, it involves a waste of resources and time.